Foreword by James Q. Wilson

The competing demands of liberty and community constitute
a fundamental cleavage that divides contemporary political philosophers and has produced
among the public at large the American culture war. The defenders of liberty
envisage a world of autonomous individuals who freely choose their destinies
and whose liberties are essential to personal development and social
democracy. The advocates of community rejoin that no one is truly autonomous,
that liberty can only exist in an environment of reasonable order, and that
personal development requires familial and neighborhood support.

This cleavage is not coterminous with that between liberal and conservative.
The supporters of liberty include libertarians who are market-oriented economic
conservatives; the defenders of community include liberals who think that
market forces are often destructive of communal life. John Rawls and Robert
Nozick, though quite different in their attitudes toward government, are alike
in basing their philosophies on freely choosing individuals. Michael Sandel and
Alasdair MacIntyre, though perhaps in disagreement on many matters of public
policy, are alike in viewing man as a social animal whose life derives meaning
ftom its civic context.

On countless issues -- drug legalization, school prayer, reproductive rights,
plant-closing laws, parental leave policy, crime-control strategies -- the
competing claims of liberty and community are often heard. In this book, George
Kelling and Catherine Coles explore this issue in perhaps its most common and
vivid incarnation -- how and to what extent should public spaces be protected?

Every day, in most big cities and many small ones, we experience the problem.
Homeless people asleep on a grate; beggars soliciting funds by the bus stop;
graffiti on the bridge abutment; teenagers hanging out in front of the deli;
loud music coming from an open window. How should conduct in public spaces be
regulated, and by whom?

For the past three decades or so, the drift in public policy has been toward
maximizing individual liberty and away from enforcing communal control.
Public drunkenness has been decriminalized, the mentally ill have been
deinstitutionalized, public solicitations have acquired broader constitutional
protection. Many of these changes were the result, not of public debate or
legislative effort, but of court decisions that have endowed individuals with
more, or more readily enforced, rights.

Courts are institutions whose special competence lies in the discernment and
application of rights. This means that to the extent courts decide matters, the
drift of policy will tend to be toward liberty and away from community. The
court will, typically, hear a case brought by (or on behalf of) an individual
beggar, sleeper, or solicitor. Such an individual rarely constitutes much of a
threat to anyone, and so the claims of communal order often seem, in the
particular case, to be suspect or overdrawn.

But the effects on a community of many individuals taking advantage of the
rights granted to an individual (or often, as the court sees it, an abstract,
depersonalized individual) are often qualitatively different from the effects
of a single person. A public space -- a bus stop, a market square, a subway
entrance -- is more than the sum of its human parts; it is a complex pattern of
interactions that can become dramatically more threatening as the scale and
frequency of those interactions increase. As the number of unconventional
individuals increases arithmetically, the number of worrisome behaviors
increases geometrically.

And so the public complains -- of aggressive panhandlers, disheveled vagrants,
and rude teenagers. The police have no easy response. To many of them, dealing
with these minor disorders is not why they became law-enforcement officers;
telling panhandlers to move on is a far cry from fighting crime. To all of
them, any intervention brings the risk of adverse publicity, hostile law suits,
and political debates in which, their experience tells them, rights are trumps.
For nearly every kind of unconventional person there seems to be an advocacy
group. Better, the police tell themselves, to pull back, do nothing. As a
result, the police often fail to do even the minimal things that the courts
have allowed. The public gets more upset, and the issue affects the outcome
of a council or mayoral race.

For many years, George Kelling has studied this problem, advised public
officials on how to cope with it, and evaluated their efforts to do so. In the
process, he has become this country's preeminent authority on the problem of
controlling disorderly conduct in public places. Until now, there has been no
comprehensive treatment of what he has learned; now, here it is.

The title -- Fixing Broken Windows is an allusion to an essay Kelling and I
published in The Atlantic Monthly in March 1982. We used the image of broken
windows to explain how neighborhoods might decay into disorder and even crime
if no one attends faithfully to their maintenance. If a factory or office
window is broken, passersby observing it will conclude that no one cares or no
one is in charge. In time, a few will begin throwing rocks to break more
windows. Soon all the windows will be broken, and now passersby will think
that, not only is no one in charge of the building, no one is in charge of the
street on which it faces. Only the young, the criminal, or the foolhardy
have any business on an unprotecred avenue, and so more and more citizens will
abandon the street to those they assume prowl it. Small disorders lead to
larger and larger ones, and perhaps even to crime.

A rights-oriented legal tradition does not easily deal with this problem. The
judge finds it hard to believe that one broken window is all that important or
that the police should be empowered to exert their authority on people who
might break more windows. The judge sees a snapshot of the street at one
moment; the public, by contrast, sees a motion picture of the street slowly,
inexorably decaying.

Kelling has seen this process unfold and understands the competing values at
stake. Through his research on the history of policing in America and his work
advising public agencies, notably the New York City Transit Authority, he has
learned how one can deal with the problem of order in public spaces at minimal
cost in individual liberty. Coles has studied the law on this matter, and sets
forth with admirable clarity its hopelessly unclear condition.

The result is a book that ought to be read by every police chief, mayor,
community activist, and concerned citizen. It provides practical guidance on
how to cope with a problem that many of us simply debate, in increasingly
strident tones, as we express our outrage over the excesses of either radical
individualism or conformist communalism.

We can reclaim our public spaces without sacrificing our essential liberties,
but to do so many groups -- the courts, the police, and many public and private
agencies -- must change how they think about these matters. Kelling and Coles
tell them how.